The endlessly growing selection of Software as a Service business applications is great … until a company’s partner adopts one that doesn’t talk to its own SaaS app. Cloud backup and restore solutions company Carbonite Inc. is addressing this gap.

Carbonite primarily uses cloud applications Marketo Inc., SalesForce.com, Zuora Inc. and NetSuite Inc., according to Justin Donlon (pictured), the company’s manager of business applications. “We’re using Informatica to bridge the gap between these different systems a lot,” he told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Informatica World in San Francisco, California. (* Disclosure below.)

A recent experience at Carbonite drew his attention to the gaps that exist even in today’s hyper-connected cloud world. Two of Carbonite’s distributors could not properly sync with the company’s ordering system. Staffers had to develop a manual system to execute orders that involved sending the purchase email to sales ops, who then passed it to finance to key into the system and finally pass it onto provisioning. “This is for a SaaS product that we sell — it’s just not scalable at all,” Donlon said.

The distributors told Carbonite they did not have any APIs with which it could integrate and asked if it could work with Electronic Data Interchange. It turned out that Informatica had an EDI capability in the cloud.

The final solution — combining Informatica’s cloud and the Salesforce.com platform — eliminated the cumbersome manual process for Carbonite and the distributors. “It’s a really kind of bolted-on solution, but we managed to put it together in a few months,” he said.

Raising data management IQ

Carbonite also uses Informatica Cloud Real Time for real-time applications; Informatica Cloud Services for batch transferring; and Informatica B2B Gateway for connectivity with partners, Donlon explained.

“One of the biggest challenges that we have right now is just defining our data,” he said. For the past week, the team has been trying to figure out what exactly the field “sale type” means, he said.

A uniform definition of different metrics, KPIs and attributes across the business is on Donlon’s wishlist. Informatica’s Intelligent Structure Discovery, a machine learning tool for data, could be the answer, but Carbonite is not quite ready to adopt it, he stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Informatica World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World. Neither Informatica Corp. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE